Cyril Smith

There have been
a number of books published in recent
decades, including “Marx
at the Millennium,” which
challenge the assertion that Marx
founded an ideology called “dialectical
materialism.” In this article,
Cyril goes a step further, in challenging
the idea that Marx was a “materialist,”
or any kind of philosopher.

Marx states in
the 1844 Manuscripts that he is
not an atheist; for Marx,
to positively assert that God does
not exist is childish.
“Man makes religion,
religion does not make man. ...
The struggle against religion is,
therefore, indirectly the struggle
against that world whose
spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is,
at one and the same time, the expression
of real suffering and a protest
against real suffering.” Likewise,
political economy cannot be abolished
other than by abolishing the world
of which it is the “aroma.”
In this article, Cyril Smith explores
Marx’s attitude towards criticism
of religion – “the prerequisite
of all criticism.”

Biographical information

Cyril attended
meetings of the Communist Party
while a student at University College
London in 1947, but was repelled
what he saw as double-talk, lies
and sectarianism. He then joined
the Revolutionary Communist Party,
and was a Trotskyist up until supporting
the expulsion of Gerry Healy from
the WRP in 1985. Cyril subsequently
embarked on a thoroughgoing re-examination
of his understanding of Marxism,
culminating in “Marx at
the Millennium,” published
by Pluto Press in 1996. This work
sought to strip the layers of interpretation
and distortion covering the work
of Karl Marx, and highlighted the
need for a fresh study of Marx's
writing. “Karl Marx and
the Future of the Human,”
was published by Lexington in 2004.
Cyril taught statistics at the London
School of Economics for many years
until his retirement in the early
1990s and has given talks and written
numerous magazine articles on themes
relating to science, philosophy,
economics and communism.